Medical Outreach project in Ghana expands

Laurens Vos works in our Dutch recruitment office. He wrote the following report during a recent visit to our projects in Ghana:

Alongside their regular medical project, many volunteers go out once a week to different schools and care homes in their area on our Medical Outreach project, to take care of the wounds and cuts of the local children.

Many of the children (like children all over the world) like playing and running around, kicking a football about or running after each other. However, when a child trips or cuts themselves in Ghana, there is often no one, or no supplies around to dress the wounds. Small wounds can infect easily with all the dust and dirt and quickly turn into serious problems. Infections can get so serious, that sometimes arms or legs need to be amputated. Some of our medical volunteers see this happening daily in the operating theatre in the hospitals.

Three of our volunteers, David Beckstead, Stacey Edwards and Jennie Wood, are based in the Akuepem Hills region and on Friday, they went to visit Kwamoso village school. They were surprised by the state of some of the wounds. The teacher lined up the children and the volunteers got to work. Minor wounds were cleaned and dressed, but they had to take several children with more severe injuries to visit the hospital later that day.

It was amazing to see the strength of some of the kids as wounds were cleansed with pure alcohol at first, and this must have stung tremendously. Yet most of the boys and girls would not react at all when it was their turn for their wounds to be cleaned.

With no breeze, and temperatures rising to 35 degrees Celsius, the volunteers worked hard all day to help all the children. There will never be enough hands to help all the kids in Ghana, but luckily, we are able to help some of them.

The Outreach project is specially set-up by Projects Abroad in Ghana and volunteers on medical placements in all our regions can get involved. We supply all volunteers with plastic gloves and all other materials needed.